Qualcomm, theSan Diego-based chipset maker was fined for US$773 million by Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission. The Commission said that Qualcomm misused the monopoly in the smartphone business to squeeze higher licensing fees and better terms out of its customers.

The commission said that Qualcomm’s dominance in CDMA and LTE chips, as well as its major patent holdings for both technologies, let the company abuse its position and refuse to license necessary patents. It’ll now be required to end those practices and parts of unfavourable deals it forged with other companies. This is not the first time that Qualcomm has been fined, South Korea and China have also fined Qualcomm [...]

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Uber Fined $20,000 Over ‘God View’ Tool in the US

Uber’s ‘God View’ tool allowed employees to access and track the location of Uber drivers and customers without their permission or their knowledge. The company ran into trouble with the tool in 2014 when an Uber executive tracked the whereabouts of a Buzzfeed journalist while she was not aware of it.

When the issue was brought out in the public, required action was taken against the executive. The concerned executive explained the act by saying the reporter’s location was monitored because she was 30 minutes late for a meeting. Uber later declared the act to be one of “poor judgement”.However, the cat was out of the bag now and had [...]

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Google Fined $1.2 Million By Spain For Violating Privacy Laws

Spain on Thursday fined Google for breaking the country’s data protection law. The charge by Spain authorities claim Google for combining personal information from its many different online services and also failing to inform users clearly on how Google uses their data.

Earlier, Google’s new privacy policies were questioned by six European countries, but Spain is the first of them to charge Google with a fine. Spain fined Google €900,000 which is $1.2 million for violation of data protection laws.

The AEPD has found that Google does not give users enough information about which data collected and for [...]

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Samsung to Pay $290 Million More To Apple

A jury on thursday decided that Samsung will have to pay Apple a sum of $290,456,793 more for its patent infringement case. This comes after Samsung has already been asked to shell out 1 billion US $ to Apple. This amount is still less than what Apple had demanded, which was $390 Million.

The total money Samsung has paid or will pay to Apple has now reached approx. $930 million, just to let you get a fair idea it is approx. 5833,23,90,000 in Indian Rupee.

For Apple, this case has always been about more than patents and money,” Apple said in a statement. “It has been about innovation and the hard [...]

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Google To Pay $17 Million For Unauthorized Web Tracking in Safari

Google has agreed to pay $17 million to settle an investigation of unauthorized tracking software on Safari Web browsers. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced the agreement on Google’s “unauthorized placement of cookies on computers using Apple Safari Web browsers during 2011 and 2012.”

The settlement includes 37 states and the federal District of Columbia. New York will receive $899,580, Schneiderman said. “Consumers should be able to know whether there are other eyes surfing the web with them. By tracking millions of people without their knowledge, Google violated not [...]

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Google To Pay €300,000 Fine for Privacy Violations to a French Agency

France’s National Commission on Computing and Freedom (CNIL) threatened Google with a €300,000 fine due to the company’s lack of compliance with a June decision aimed at protecting users’ private data. The French agency that regulates information technology says Google had not satisfactorily responded to its June decision giving the company three months to be more upfront about the data it collects from users.

In a statement Friday, France’s National Commission on Computing and Freedom, known as CNIL, said:

Google hasn’t made requested changes, including specifying to users what it [...]

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Sony To Pay £250k Fine For 2011 UK Data Breach

Sony has admitted it won’t carry on its appeal against a £250,000 fine handed to the firm in Britain following serious breaches of its PlayStation networks in 2011.

ICO fined the firm back in January, after finding that the breach was “preventable” and that Sony, as a business, “should have known better” as the occurrence fell under the Data Protection Act.

A Sony spokesperson said. “After careful consideration we are withdrawing our appeal. This decision reflects our commitment to protect the confidentiality of our network security from disclosures in the course of the proceeding. We continue to disagree [...]

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Google Fined In Germany Over Street View Data Collection

A German privacy regulator fined Google €145,000 on Monday for its systematic, illegal collection of personal data while it was creating its Street View mapping service, and it called on European lawmakers to significantly raise fines for violations of data protection laws.

It found that while specially equipped Google vehicles took city snapshots between 2008 and 2010 for its Street View function, which supplements its standard map service, they had also picked up data from unsecured wireless networks.

“Among the information gathered in the drive-bys were significant amounts of personal data of varying quality. For example emails, [...]